Most use of sign language is spontaneous, unplanned, embedded in a one-to-one situation and transient. General sign language corpora aim at such naturalistic data. Thus it can be expected that they include phenomena of spontaneous language similar to the ones described for spontaneous speech in vocal languages: that is, (dis)fluencies such as pauses, hesitations, errors, false starts and repairs as well as discourse markers. In this paper we explore which of the known phenomena of spontaneous language from previous research on vocal and sign languages could be identified in the DGS Corpus using the annotations at hand. We describe our search strategies, consider additional annotation tiers for spontaneous language, and provide examples for the phenomena identified.

This paper presents SignHunter, a tool for collecting isolated signs, and discusses application possibilities. SignHunter is successfully used within the DGS-Korpus project to collect name signs for places and cities. The data adds to the content of a German Sign Language (DGS) – German dictionary which is currently being developed, as well as a freely accessible subset of the DGS Corpus, the Public DGS Corpus. We discuss reasons to complement a natural language corpus by eliciting concepts without context and present an application example of SignHunter.